Regular expressions and used in [[Perl]], [[Apache Rewrite]], [[Vim]] among many other uses.

{| | align=”center” style=”background:#f0f0f0;”|’'’Regex’’’ | align=”center” style=”background:#f0f0f0;”|’'’Meaning’’’ |- | .|| Any single character except a newline |- | ^|| The beginning of the line or string |- | $|| The end of the line or string |- | || Zero or more of the last character |- | +|| One or more of the last character |- | ?|| Zero or one of the last character |- | (ben\.)?goodacre.name|| ben.goodacre.name or goodacre.name |- | t.e|| t followed by any 1 single character followed by e. This will match the , tre , tle , but not te or tale |- | ^f|| f at the beginning of a line |- | ^ftp|| ftp at the beginning of a line |- | e$|| e at the end of a line |- | und|| un followed by zero or more d characters. This will match un , und , undd , unddd etc. |- | .*|| Any string without a newline. This is because the . matches anything except a newline and the * means zero or more of these. |- | ^$|| A line with nothing in it. |- | [qjk]||Either q or j or k |- | [^qjk]||Neither q nor j nor k |- | [a-z]||Anything from a to z inclusive |- | [^a-z]||No lower case letters |- | [a-zA-Z]||Any letter |- | [a-z]+||Any non-zero sequence of lower case letters |- | [^qjk]+ ||Any non-zero sequence that does not contain a q nor j nor k. |- | jelly|cream||Either jelly or cream |- | (eg|le)gs||Either eggs or legs |- | (da)+||Either da or dada or dadada or… |- |
||A newline |- | \ ||A tab |- | \w||Any alphanumeric (word) character. |- | ||The same as [a-zA-Z0-9_] |- | \W||Any non-word character. |- | ||The same as [^a-zA-Z0-9_] |- | \d||Any digit. The same as [0-9] |- | \D||Any non-digit. The same as [^0-9] |- | \s||Any whitespace character: space, tab, newline, etc |- | \S||Any non-whitespace character |- | \b||A word boundary, outside [] only |- | \B||No word boundary |} ===Match a date yyyy-mm-dd===

\\d{4}-\\d{2}-\\d{2}

Needs some work, will also match 9999-99-99 . ===Time hh:mm:ss===

\\d{2}:\\d{2}:\\d{2}

Needs some work, will also match 99:99:99 . ===Mac address=== With -‘s or :’s

[0-9a-f][0-9a-f][:-][0-9a-f][0-9a-f][:-][0-9a-f][0-9a-f][:-][0-9a-f][0-9a-f][:-][0-9a-f][0-9a-f][:-][0-9a-f][0-9a-f]

===IP adress===

^([0-9]|[1-9][0-9]|1([0-9][0-9])|2([0-4][0-9]|5[0-5]))\\.([0-9]|[1-9][0-9]|1([0-9][0-9])|2([0-4][0-9]|5[0-5]))\\.([0-9]|[1-9][0-9]|1([0-9][0-9])|2([0-4][0-9]|5[0-5]))\\.([0-9]|[1-9][0-9]|1([0-9][0-9])|2([0-4][0-9]|5[0-5]))$

'’References http://www.analyticsmarket.com/freetools/ipregex’’
Shorter but will also show 999.999.999.999:<pre>grep -Eo ‘[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}’ </pre>